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Finding a good baby carrier is like finding a good man...

It takes a lot of time and you have to go through a lot of bad ones. Before I had a baby, I thought the simplest way to figure out what kind of gear I would need was to read reviews on sites like Baby Gear Lab and Baby Center (if only parenting were this simple.) As ergo was consistently named one of the best carriers, I felt fortunate when my sister-in-law re-gifted me her never used ergo carrier. Unfortunately, my baby did not feel the same way. I quickly discovered why the ergo was never used by my sister-in-law. Whenever I put my baby in the ergo, he cried. Not cute little kitten squeals, but full on pterodactyl type shrieks. So desperate was my little one to escape from the ergo that he would arch his back and use his feet to launch himself off of me in some kind of deranged baby suicide attempt. There was nothing ergonomic about the ergo for my baby or I, so we moved onto the baby k’tan. I loved my baby k’tan – it was soft, comfy, easy to put on and oh so cuddly. It rem...

Special Friday Post - My Yahoo Portfolio Experience - Part 1

If you have read the Koo Review before then you know that we are avid readers.  I have especially been interested in finance and investing as of late, as well as some marketing. One of the key items I've learned from reading The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham were strategies on how to invest in the stock market.  I created a Yahoo Portfolio account to track five companies that I found on the 52 week low list that I would have picked back on July 14th to invest in.   I purchased 100 shares of each company (to keep things simple).  My focus was: 1) Large cap companies. 2) A history of steady dividend payments. 3) Consistent positive net income for the past three years. 4) An established brand 5) The company sold or produced something that I understood So as you see below this is how our portfolio did after three weeks. So while it was not all great, you can see that the total gain was $558 as of August 4, 2017 at 10:45 a.m. ...

9 Core Values to Help Disciplined People to Steadily Build Wealth

This post is for people who are self-disciplined and looking to invest money outside of their employer sponsored retirement plans.  It is also for those who are aspiring to find ways to generate passive income. As an educator in New York City, we are provided an employer sponsored 403-b called the Tax Deferred Annuity (or TDA for short).  For more information on it, I wrote about some of my observations about educators and retirement in an earlier article called A little bit goes a long way.  For those who are not familiar with TDA, it offers a variety of investment options but the most promising is the guaranteed returned fix rate for UFT members at 7% annually, and 8.25% for all other members. The maximum contribution that an individual can make is $18,000 for the year, which is similar to a traditional IRA for everyone else. If you find yourself in a unique situation where you still have money to invest then I would like to share some of my own ideas that I h...